“You mean your mother,” Shan said, trying to grasp the mix of frustration, anger, and regret in Kypo’s eyes.
“The last one to see Tenzin’s body was her uncle. Except,” Kypo added in a hollow tone, “our old uncle, that friend of yours, has been murdered.”
Moving at the slow jog used by the mountain people to cover distances, Shan soon reached the cleft in the rock face where Kypo’s mother had disappeared. He paused before stepping into the shadows to glance back at the village, still trying to make sense of Kypo’s announcement. He had never heard Kypo speak of an uncle or great-uncle, could not think of an old villager who was a friend of Shan’s, could not fathom why there would not be a greater disturbance in the village if one of their elders had been killed.
Emerging from the long, dark passage after fifty yards, he found himself in a small wind-beaten valley populated only by a couple dozen of sheep and, at the base of the cliff at the far side, a solitary woman unloading a donkey. Shan had met Ama Apte, the astrologer, weeks earlier at Kypo’s house when he had come to retrieve equipment that Kypo and the blacksmith had repaired. He had accepted her abrupt invitation-more like a command- to return to her house with her so she could divine his fortune by casting her pair of bone Mo dice. She was not the oldest person in the village, but she was the most respected, and the villagers spoke of her with awe. She lived, like many of the older Tibetans, in more than one world at the same time. They all endured twenty-first century Chinese Tibet, but did their best to live in a second world, the traditional Tibet that had existed prior to the Chinese occupation. And Ama Apte walked in one more world, a much older one, from the mists of early Tibet, in which sorcerers and demon gods were as alive as the longhaired sheep he now walked past.
Shan halted before he reached the woman, lowering himself into the meditation position beside a large boulder, one hand draped downward over his leg, in what Tibetan Buddhists called the earth-touching gesture. He watched her work, half expecting to be chased away. The fortuneteller had little patience for outsiders. He had known several astrologers and oracles in Tibet, nearly all of whom were intense, inwardly troubled people who, even in towns, lived their lives apart.
Ama Apte paused momentarily when she spotted him several minutes later, then touched the gau, the prayer box, that hung from her neck and continued unloading the boughs of juniper. When she finished, she slapped the donkey on its flank to send it off to graze, then she ventured out onto the valley floor to gather scraps of dried wood from the gnarled shrubs scattered across the landscape. As he watched he recalled the fortune she had told him at their first meeting. He had not asked for the divination, but she had insisted, as if she had her own secret reason. The dice had come up with the symbols Pa Tsa, meaning the Demon of Affliction in the charts used by astrologers. She had seemed strangely pleased, and when he asked its meaning she had said it depended on the question that was being asked. If, for example, he was worried about his inability to find inner harmony, then the dice foretold that his unrest would continue, that he would even break his own vows in search of it, that he would never find it again without doing great and painful penance. Only afterward, on his pallet that night, had he understood he had missed the entire point. Shan should have asked what question she had been asking about him.
The uneasiness of that day returned as he watched Ama Apte. She was like no other Tibetan woman he had known, strong yet somehow seeming as vulnerable as a child, handsome but with a face that was always lined with worry. She had the eyes of an old lama but the quickness and energy of a young woman. She had, he realized, cast the dice about Shan more than once before, for Ama Apte had been the one to declare Shan must be the carrier of corpses made by the mother mountain. He had accepted the duty without questioning her, for he knew she would have resented the query, as if he were challenging the fates.
Shan warily approached her as she worked, following her lead in stacking wood beside the green boughs. After a quarter hour he stepped over to a flat boulder, covered it with his jacket, and set upon it several walnuts and pieces of dried fruit from the pouch that hung from his belt. He made a sign of offering, then lowered his head. Moments later the woman stood over him. She silently selected seven morsels, the traditional number for offerings to the deities, and disappeared around a high outcropping thirty feet away. Quickly returning, she settled at the makeshift table opposite Shan.
“In all my life my uncle Kundu has been with me,” the diviner suddenly said, with something like a sob, “except for that short time between faces. This time I will not find him again, not the way he was taken. He was not prepared for what happened. He will be an angry ghost, roaming alone, confused, battered about by the winds.”
At death, traditional Tibetans believed, someone who was adequately prepared, who had the right prayers in his mind at the moment of passing, and spoken over him after death, could make a quick, peaceful progression to a new incarnation. But the souls of murder victims could wander aimlessly, without hope, even without comprehension, for years.
“There are things we can do to help,” Shan suggested. “Speak to his spirit. Reconcile his death.”
Ama Apte had begun to whisper an old song toward the sky, a song used by pilgrims. Shan did not think she had heard until she abruptly turned her head toward him. “How?”
“Identify his killer. Explain the circumstances of his death. It is something I have helped with before. Truth is a powerful force, in this world and the next.”
“You’re Chinese,” she observed. It was a statement of fact, without rancor.
“I began my life in China, spent more than forty years there,” Shan confessed.
A grin flickered across her face, then the diviner searched the distant clouds as if looking for explanation. “But you started a new one in Tibet, to atone for the first.” She looked down at his arm, as if in afterthought. “People say you are one of those convicts.”
Shan rolled up his sleeve and showed her his prisoner tattoo. “My reincarnation began at government expense.”
The woman’s fingers were on his arm, rubbing the numbers the way she sometimes rubbed the figures on her fortune-telling dice before casting them. She grew sober and stared intensely at the numbers as if they contained some hidden message. Two cubes of bone appeared in her palm, her Mo dice, which she tossed onto Shan’s open jacket. She gazed at the dice in silence, then abruptly scooped them up, took his hand, and led him around the outcropping
Shan was prepared for many possibilities, perhaps every possibility but the one he encountered. His gaze shifted back and forth, searching the rough ground along the bottom of the cliff face, bracing himself for more tragedy. There were more spindly shrubs, a smaller pile of firewood, a pika that squealed and fled as they appeared. And a dead mule.
As if to resolve any doubt, Ama Apte sat beside the body, put the mule’s head in her lap, and stroked it.
Her uncle had been murdered, Kypo had said, a friend of yours. Shan knelt uncertainly, studying the corpse, seeing the large hole in the mule’s forehead and realizing as he saw the jagged white blaze that it was indeed a friend. It was the mule the villagers always brought for him to carry the dead down the mountain. In the cold, dry atmosphere flesh decomposed very slowly, and the mule still wore the harness Shan had used to carry Tenzin’s body the day of the murders.
He gazed at the animal numbly, confounded by the strange discovery, then paced along the body as Ama Apte murmured a prayer. Finally he knelt again and stroked the mule’s nose as he often had on the trail.